Archive: June 12th, 2009

Not much has been happening this summer. I’ve been doing some writing, some project work, and the like. Hopefully the writing will live to see the light of day and the project work will come out smoothly. At some point, I want to write a bit about games and entertainment, based on some productive discussions with Audrey, also referencing “player-centric design” which I have been reading about recently. I am going to be taking an AI class in the fall, the first AI class that I have ever taken, but it is actually an advanced one: specifically on narrative and AI. A friend of mine has described his recent disenchantment with AI, but I remain hopeful. Since I haven’t taken an introductory course, a few others and I are going to be doing some prep work before the class. The textbook we are reading is “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach”, which is a bit stuffy (and curiously written, given all of the AI critiques I’ve read), but nice and thorough. A new edition of the book is coming out in October, so I’m borrowing a copy for now, and will probably get a real one later. One thing that surprised me, though, is after doing a cursory search online, there don’t seem to be many good open APIs for AI. At least not in the three minute search that I did. A lot of the algorithms described lend themselves very well to good abstract design principles, so maybe I’ll see about whipping something up later on.